job satisfaction | Funny about Money

Recently a PF blogger held forth on a perennially popular topic, how to achieve happiness on the job. Sorry—I failed to bookmark the post and so can’t offer a link, but I’m sure some of you will recall reading it.

Coincidentally, shortly after that post went up, a friend whose research interest is the Latina experience in higher education (she tracks the progress of first-generation Hispanic women Ph.D.’s who stay in academia) told me about an article focussing on a particularly trying period that afflicted a campus where I used to work. Revisiting those events depressed me, but then, foolishly, instead of blowing it off I unearthed some ancient documents and e-mails that pretty much confirmed the article’s reports, a truly depressing exercise.

It’s hard to understand how any of us who worked in that place survived with our marbles intact. Matter of fact, several did not.

That one should quit one’s job and go somewhere else when one is unhappy is easier said than done, especially for academics. Jobs in higher education do not come along often, especially if your degree is in the liberal arts. Competition is fierce, even for poorly paid positions at podunk schools. It took me years—literally—to get out of that place. I applied for job after job, both in and out of education. At one point, I seriously thought of quitting and starting a housecleaning business.

Finally I got an offer for a tenure-track position. Given my three books in print and sterling teaching record, the department promised me a shot at tenure within three years. But: the job was in South Carolina, whose citizens occupied themselves by defending their right to fly a Confederate flag over the state capitol. It entailed a $10,000 cut in pay. The college provided a $2,000 moving allowance; three moving companies gave estimates in the $8,000 range to transport me across the continent.

The prospect of taking a massive pay cut and then forking up $6,000 to move, in middle age, to a part of the country where I knew no one and where the prevailing culture’s values would conflict with mine looked worse than staying where I was.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day and evening with another friend whose job truly does make her miserable. The operation where she works is so badly managed that the atmosphere has become toxic, and it’s hard to understand how its malignant supervisor has escaped notice from the higher-ups. My friend has decided to leave—wisely, I think. Even though she feels this is not the best time financially, her husband has a good job that is unlikely to go away and that will support them both. Eventually she probably will find something else, after she’s had time to recover psychologically and physically from the grinding experience she’s gone through.

She has put up with a great deal of suffering for a very long time, partly because of financial considerations, partly because (like any target of abuse) she has imagined her unhappiness is somehow her own fault, and partly because she doesn’t quit things lightly.

My take on this is that work is not called “work,” a job is not called a “job” because earning a living is intended to be fun. The whole idea that we can expect to enjoy our jobs may be utterly misguided. If work were fun, we would call it “partying,” not “working.” Clearly, some jobs are less onerous than others. And some people delude themselves that they are having great fun on their jobs. But most don’t.

It strikes me that “job happiness” is a contradiction in terms.You have to put bread on your table. You can’t always just quit because your job sucks.

How to deal with this? Several possibilities come to mind.

1. Find a way to become self-employed, so at least you have only one boss: yourself. Start a side job and quietly develop it into something that can support you, even if you have to cut your standard of living until you can get the business running. A friend of mine made a good living as a cross-country truck driver, but he imagined he should have a life. His coworkers scoffed when he quit his job to start a lawn business. Within a year, he said, he was earning more than he’d made driving big rigs and enjoying life a great deal more.

2. Or seek employment at outfits that do not actively abuse their workers.

3. Restrict the job to the workplace. Leave it behind when you walk out the door, and walk out the door on time. Do not work overtime, and do not take a job where you are expected to devote your entire being to your occupation. Draw a distinct line between “occupation” and “life,” and jealously guard your life.

4. In an unhappy job, do as little work as possible without risking dismissal. Perform the work you must do competently, but do no more than necessary. Take all your vacation time, engineering every three-day and four-day weekend you can manage. Keep a low profile, and get out of the place as soon as you can.

5. If at all possible, move to another job once every few years. Jobs that seem wonderful when you start soon grow old. The challenge of starting with a new company or building a new enterprise at least injects a little interest into the chore of earning a living.

6. Move up or move down. If what you’re doing looks like a dead end, find a way to tunnel out. To move up, take out a loan and go back to school; get training in something that will take you in a new direction. Or consider taking a lesser job, one whose sole purpose is to put bread on the table without requiring that you donate your soul to the devil. One man with a fine higher education, for example, discovered that his entire outlook on life brightened after hequit a career and took a job as a forklift operator.

7. Retire at the earliest possible moment. When your mortgage and your car are paid off, it is amazing how little you need to live on. Get out of debt; build a pile of savings; learn to live frugally; get yourself under an inexpensive, paid-off roof; divest your life of clutter (physical and spiritual); and quit working.

It’s important to build a divide between you and your job. You are not your job! Your value as a human being is not determined by what you do for a living or by how much you earn.Gettingthat concept into your head—and truly believing it—is the real basis for happiness on the job.

News flash! Researchers have discovered that, when it comes to job satisfaction, money matters more than a warm-fuzzy boss or an office decorated like a fern bar. “Conventional wisdom,” we’re told, has it that a pleasant environment and an understanding boss are more important to worker happiness than compensation.

New York Times columnist Paul Brown, citing the results of a survey reported in Family Business Agenda, reveals the top five keys to job satisfaction:

Pay
Benefits
Job security
Flexibility to balance work and life issues
Ability to communicate effectively with management

I have to allow that the Great Desert University has given me and my staff some mighty nice office space, as campus space goes. It’s in an old building called back out of condemnation, but IMHO much nicer than the proud new concrete and glass blocks the more privileged occupy: we get a big atrium full of tropical plants with an amazing flowering tree right outside our window. And for that we are all grateful.

The decent health insurance and the generous vacation allowance go a long way toward encouraging me to stay on the job, as does the fact that the university has a policy that encourages telecommuting. So does my low-key dean, who does not micromanage but stays out of the way so I can do my job effectively.

Ah, but yes, money matters. The late great switch from bimonthly to biweekly pay did nothing for my morale, nor did I notice any of my staff dedicating a dance to spring to the wisdom of this decision. Twenty weeks of incorrect paychecks didn’t help much, either. And when Barack Obama proposed to exempt the low-income elderly from taxes and then defined “low income” as exactly my salary, well . . . that was alarming. If I were ten or fifteen years younger, I’d be looking for another job right now.

Because Arizona is a right-to-work state, pay is relatively low compared to other urbanized American states. For educators, this phenomenon is enhanced by the fact that the legislature has historically underfunded education.

GDU has justified its pauperly salaries by telling prospective faculty that living in a resort climate is worth the difference, and besides, it’s less costly to live here because you don’t have to buy all those winter clothes. (Yeah. Recruiters have actually said that with a straight face!) But the truth is, the cost of living in the Phoenix metropolitan area-the fifth-largest city in the country-is no lower than in other major U.S. cities, with the exception of grand urbs such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle. Prices for housing within reasonable driving distance of work are comparable to or higher than housing prices in most large cities. Gas is almost $3 a gallon. Food is expensive, and because sprawl has run most farmers out of business, pickings are mighty slim in farmer’s markets. The cost of one power company’s electricity is said to be the highest in the nation. So while salaries are low, it’s no cheaper to live here than in places where pay is better. To my mind, that translates to “lower standard of living.”

It’s hard to imagine how anyone could conclude otherwise, or fail to see how much money matters.
Am I all wet? What keeps you on your job? And what do you see as the greatest contributor to your job satisfaction?

“Job Happiness”: The oxymoron of the century

No kidding?